Cameras on I-80 between Truckee and Reno. The canyon section runs from Floriston to Gold Ranch.
Eastbound from Truckee to Reno is about 31 miles and takes 35 minutes in the dry. It is the easy half of the crossing — Donner is behind you — and that is exactly why it catches people.
Our cameras put Truckee at 5,905 ft and the Wells Avenue camera in Reno at 4,482 ft. That is a drop of 1,423 ft, most of it in the middle third, through the Truckee River canyon.
The canyon
Between the Floriston camera at 5,291 ft and Gold Ranch at 4,923 ft the road runs in a narrow, steep-sided river canyon. It is the part that behaves differently from everything either side of it:
- It is unlit. No street lighting between Truckee and Verdi
- It holds ice. The walls keep the sun off the pavement all day in winter, so a wet afternoon becomes a frozen evening while the open sections either side stay merely damp
- It is the last place you expect trouble, because the summit is 15 miles behind you and the lights of Reno are almost in sight
Black ice here is a night-and-early-morning phenomenon. The road looks wet, and at 4 p.m. it was.
The state line runs through it
The CA/NV stateline at Gold Ranch, about 5,019 ft, is roughly in the middle of the canyon — and it is where Caltrans hands over to NDOT.
Two agencies, two feeds, two sets of chain controls. A restriction can be posted on one side and not the other, and neither agency's map shows you the other's. That is the single most useful thing to know about this stretch: a clear Nevada 511 does not mean a clear drive if you are starting in California.
Where the controls actually are
Eastbound, coming down: Truckee (5,905 ft), Overland Trail (5,820 ft), Boca (5,531 ft), the Floriston on-ramp (about 5,387 ft), then the stateline at Gold Ranch (about 5,006 ft).
Mogul at 4,724 ft is westbound only. Coming into Reno the stateline is the last control you pass. Below it there is nothing to stop you, which is not the same as nothing to worry about.
At night the cameras are harder to read
A still from an unlit canyon at 11 p.m. is mostly black. Caltrans keeps the previous four images, so the strip below a camera beats the current frame. All four dark is night. Three clear and one not is weather arriving.
The Truckee Scales eastbound camera at 5,826 ft is the last well-lit view before the canyon. Full list on I-80 webcams, and the corridor detail on I-80 road conditions.